"Government’s exclusive one-sided upliftment and empowerment policies constitute serious disempowerment and infringement on the basic human rights and dignity of the group against whom this one-sided empowerment is aimed. The particular disempowerment is the direct result of legislation and corporate decisions by which one group is being empowered at the expense of our members who are being wronged. They are being targeted as a group to carry the blame and to be the cause of their own disempowerment."

The Nederduits Gereformeerde Church in Limpopo expressed this viewpoint in an official paper on a theological survey of the ethical nature of the particular type of violence displayed in farm attacks.

The paper was first compiled by the Ring of Louis Louis Trichardt – an area in which farm attacks are prevalent. The Limpopo Provincial Synod of the church accepted the paper and is now distributing it to all interested parties.

The paper states that the nature and incidence of farm attacks are obviously much more than ordinary crime.

"The cruel brutality, torture and physical maiming and mutilation in these crimes are aimed at displaying our congregation members in their state of official disempowerment.

"Our members are part of the law-abiding, productive citizens, active in business and many professions where they are job creators and contributors of vital inputs in the wellbeing of the country and all its people. They are predominantly Afrikaans speaking.

"The criminals’ aim to humiliate is the result of a feeling of power, derived from and driven by the structural disempowerment of our members by the authorities, companies, spiritual and social institutions.

"The upliftment of one group of people should never be engineered by disempowering another group.

"Our members are being dehumanised by putting them up as a target against whom empowerment takes place as a structural and organised process. Their right to job opportunities, safety, official assistance, fairness and righteousness are being made subservient to a one-sided process of empowerment which strips them of their rights.

"Deliberate disempowerment turns into dehumanisation, because the deliberate, openly organised process of public disempowerment is perceived and accepted as a fact that members of the disempowered group can no longer lay claim to basic human rights and that violence against them is therefore perfectly acceptable.

"Within this structural violence, our members are being displayed as people against whom violence is justified.

"This intention to disempower is the common denominator between the authorities and institutions on the one side and individual criminals who display in their personal violence the spirit of official structural disempowerment. They feel that violence against our members is justified. These individual evil-doers are empowered by institutions which systematically harm our members.

"Therefore, every government institution, company and spiritual and social institution who partakes in the dehumanisation of our members through structural violence, are collectively responsible for each and every farm attack and killing of our members.

"We believe that it is the church’s duty to point out this collective accountability and to address the public conscience accordingly," the paper reads. It goes on to say, amongst others: "Typical about the structural violence against our members is that when they are attacked by individual criminals, the authorities and other institutions explain it as if our members’ attitudes and relations with their farm workers, or their past are responsible for this violence against them. We see this reaction as an effort to avoid their collective accountability. As church, we will not remain silent about this.

"Why did people in Nazi Germany push a Jew from the pavement, insult him and openly damage or harm his business?

"Who will dare to say today that the violence and open vilification and insulting and degrading behaviour against Jewish people in Nazi Germany was a justified expression of anger resulting from their past and that the Jews should have reacted to it by establishing better relations with their German neighbours?

"These were not actions planned by the state during secret meetings by night and then executed by secret agents. It was done by individuals who felt themselves empowered to act like that against the Jews.

"Who empowered them in this way? The authorities, companies, social institutions and even churches.

"They were dehumanised by these institutions and this dehumanisation was the force by which individuals felt themselves justified and empowered in their personal violence. In their personal violence, they demonstrated the spirit of the structural violence against the Jews.

"This also happened during the Apartheid era. Where did people get the power to insult people in public, to assault and belittle them? Who will dare today to ascribe this to the people who were so humiliated? It had its origin in the structural violence of the community institutions. Without this structural violence, the spirit of personal violence would never have manifested itself in such brutal and humiliating ways in public.

"This is exactly the position in which our members find themselves at this point in time. The structural violence creates the atmosphere in which individual acts of violence eventually manifest themselves in a spirit of brutal violence which is something different to mere crime. This is now unpardonable. It is now totally unjustifiable. It is now unthinkable to ascribe it to the past or the actions of our members."